Face Value (the Prosopa of Money)

Abstract

At the Prada Foundation in Milan, I recently visited an exhibition curated by Germano Celant and dedicated to the works of the American artist William Copley (1919–96), who was also a gallerist and friend of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. With a distant interest (I wasn’t really convinced by what I saw), I was strolling in front of the paintings, drawings, and collages, when I stumbled upon a mirror embedded in—or grafted on—an enlarged reproduction of a $100 bill, a banknote hollowed out by the empty contours of feminine bodies. I stepped closer to the wall to read the label: “Feel Like A Hundred Bucks, 1986; acrylic, charcoal, and mirror on canvas.” I then stepped back and took a picture in which I appear in the mirror, with my face masked by the device (an iPad) that I am holding to photograph it (fig. 1). Of course, there are many works with or about money in modern and contemporary art. In 1919 Duchamp drew a check (in both senses of the verb to draw, not unlike its French equivalent, tirer) for his dentist Daniel Tzanck, thus creating—according to his own terminology—a “readymade imité” titled Chèque Tzanck orDessin Dada.1 In 1924 Duchamp issued a limited edition of thirty Monte